Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, and he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Mohamed Sahimi.
He is a professor of chemical engineering at USC and a regular writer for great outlets like antiwar.com and Lobe Log, the wonderful and heroic Jim Lobe's blog, Lobe Log.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Mohamed?
I'm fine.
Thank you for having me in your program, Scott.
Hey man, I'm always happy to talk to you because you know so much about, well, not just Iran, but America's Iran policy and all the ins and outs of what's going on there.
And I guess I'd like to start with a statement by the Ayatollah, not the president of Iran, but the so-called supreme leader there, where he said something, I'm not exactly sure, but I think the loose translation was, we're not having a war with the United States.
I don't know what you're talking about.
This is not happening at all.
We're not doing a thing.
We don't want one.
They don't want one.
What do you mean?
And I wonder how significant that is.
Maybe it's a ruse and he's trying to trick us and they're preparing for a sneak attack.
What do you think?
Absolutely not.
Iran has not invaded or attacked a country in 300 years.
Iran, whatever we think of its regime, is not seeking a war with the United States.
All the reports about Iran's threats are basically fabricated.
What has happened is that this country has imposed suffocating sanctions on Iran that is damaging Iranian people, hurting their daily lives on a daily basis.
It has listed part of its official military force as a terrorist organization after the same military force contributed greatly to the defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
And it has been rattle-sabering about war with Iran.
And therefore, the Iranian leaders decided to take a precautionary approach to prepare themselves, to defend themselves if war breaks out.
So whatever we hear, which is in fact has been confirmed by Europeans and many American intelligence officials, as reported by New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, is that it is a United States provocation that has basically motivated Iranians to prepare in case the United States attacks that country.
So whatever they have done is preparing to defend themselves, not to attack anybody.
I don't think Ayatollah Khamenei wants a war with the United States.
I think he is fully aware that if Iran and the United States begin a war, it will destroy Iran.
The United States will not win such a war.
It hasn't been able to win the war in Afghanistan for 18 years.
It wasn't able to win the war in Iraq.
It destroyed Libya, but then Libya is a country in ruins rather than the economically advanced nation that it was before 2011.
And even though this country has helped Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates to wage war in Yemen, after four years they haven't won the war in Yemen either.
So the United States will not be able to win a war.
The United States can destroy Iran, that's for sure.
They can carpet bomb Iran and destroy Iran, and Khamenei and other Iranian leaders are fully aware of it.
And therefore they don't seek a war with the United States.
Whatever they have done, and I'm not sure what they have done, aside from some claims, it is in response to the threats that John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and other hawkish Trump administration officials who have been looking for an excuse to attack Iran for years.
This goes back at least two decades.
Bolton has been wanting to attack Iran for at least 20 years.
So these are the people who have been threatened in Iran.
So anybody, regardless of how we think of them, has a right to defend himself, to defend his country.
So whatever Iranians have done, I emphasize again, if they have done anything, it's preparation to defend themselves, not to attack any country, and in particular US forces in that region.
Well, and it's really not much of a mystery here as far as the chicken and the egg scenario.
The US just added the IRGC to the terrorist list, essentially unprovoked.
And in fact, Benjamin Netanyahu said it was a favor to him.
Completely correct.
And for Bolton and Pompeo and people like them to think that they can take any action against Iran or any other country for that matter, and not expect any reaction from that country, is just preposterous.
Any nation has the right to defend itself.
Any nation leaders have limits on their patience, and the minimum they can do is to prepare themselves to defend themselves if attacked by the United States.
Yeah.
And you know, you don't have to take, obviously, you're not taking Iran's side in this, necessarily just the same side as the facts.
That's all.
The USA is really picking this fight for no reason.
We celebrated just a few years ago, this major step forward of passing this nuclear deal, which as I think hopefully everyone understands, was really unnecessary.
Iran was never making bombs and they were always inside the NPT.
But this really took the threat of war in the name of that fake excuse, the pretended threat of Iran's nuclear weapons program that didn't exist, off the table.
And it opened up the possibility, at least, well, first of all, it took war off the table.
That full stop right there is huge.
But then opened up the possibility toward further improvement of relations.
I mean, there was a big Boeing deal to supply spare parts, but I think planes as well.
And all that's canceled now.
I mean, that was just the beginning.
I'm not taking Boeing's side, but I'm just saying the so-called America's national interest here, the way they usually define it, there's plenty of opportunity to just go ahead and get along now.
And then Trump just canceled all that and backed right out of that, essentially completely unprovoked.
The only side I take, Scott, here is the side of peace.
I don't want a war between my old country and between my adopted country.
I have lived in the United States for 41 years.
I have made my life here.
I have made my career here.
My children were born here and they're growing up here.
And I love this country.
I don't want this country to get into another useless, destructive war in the Middle East.
We have killed enough people in the Middle East.
We have destroyed enough nations in the Middle East.
And enough is enough.
The infrastructure of this country needs a major updating and repair.
And that costs, by all estimates, around only $1 trillion.
I say only because, as President Trump himself has said, we have spent close to $7 trillion in the Middle East, and we have got nothing in return for that $7 trillion other than animosity of the people of the Middle East towards ourselves.
So it is not a question of whether we take Iran's side or the United States' side.
It's a question of taking the peace side.
As you said, after the nuclear agreement between Iran and 5 Plus 1 was signed, Iran ordered 100 Boeing aircraft, worth about $20 billion.
And Iran was very eager for U.S. oil companies to go into Iranian market, develop some large Iranian oil fields that have basically remained untapped.
They have huge reservoirs, but they haven't been developed.
European countries also rushed to Tehran and signed major investment agreements with the Iranian government and the private sector.
All of that has been destroyed.
After the president imposed the same sanctions last year, at this time, on Iran, all the European corporations pulled out of Iran.
The agreement with Boeing was canceled, and it has put tremendous pressure on Iranian economy.
The saddest aspects of this are two things.
One, the most hurt part of these sanctions and and beating the drums of war.
The most innocent victims of this are Iranian people, are ordinary Iranian people.
Ordinary Iranian people have always been pro-United States.
They like the United States.
They want to visit the United States.
A lot of them have sent or would like to send their children to the United States.
And they have always been pro-U.S. in a region where most people are against United States.
But that has changed, because although the Iranian people don't like the Iranian regime for a lot of reasons, for a lot of good reasons, they recognize that in this particular case, it is definitely the United States' fault for this rise in tension, for imposing sanctions that have been promised and have been signed into agreement to be at least suspended or canceled altogether.
After the nuclear agreement with Iran was signed, there was celebration in major Iranian cities, streets, because they thought this is a new chapter in the relationship between Iran and the West, and in particular the United States.
Iranian people, especially the young Iranian people, thought that major investment will come into Iran, the job situation, the economy, and so on, will improve.
With that, the middle class will be in a better position to push for more freedom and more open society, and so on.
All of it has been destroyed.
People are struggling on a daily basis.
And this is why Pompeo and Bolton always claim, and they just lie to their teeth, that they're on the side of Iranian people.
They are not.
They are just pursuing their imperialist plan to destroy Iran.
That's what they want.
Pompeo in 2014 suggested that with 2,000 sorties, with 2,000 bombings of Iran, we can destroy Iran.
Bolton has been calling for bombing Iran for at least two decades.
Right before the nuclear agreement with Iran was signed in July of 2015, Bolton published this op-ed in New York Times that said, to prevent Iran bomb, bomb Iran.
There was no Iran bomb, and he was just lying to his teeth.
But he is of the opinion that Iranian leaders are pursuing a nuclear weapon program.
And unfortunately, some of these major mainstream newspapers in this country are once again repeating the same lie.
The New York Times, in its report that U.S. plan to send 120,000 soldiers, you know, forced to the Middle East in case of war with Iraq, it says that the reason-no, it says that they will send it if Iran accelerates its nuclear weapon program.
There is no nuclear weapon program in Iran.
Iran's nuclear program, first of all, is very limited, according to the nuclear agreement that Iran signed with Five Plus One.
It has been under strict control of International Atomic Energy Agency.
And since July of 2015, the IAEA has certified 14 times that Iran has lived by its obligation and has delivered on its promises, even though all the economic benefits that Iran had been promised, none of it was delivered.
None of it.
As Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said, he said, Europeans talk 99 percent of the time and deliver only one percent of the time.
They haven't even done that.
So all of these talks about, you know, we are on the side of Iranian people, just nonsense, just sheer lies.
They are hurting ordinary Iranians every day, on an everyday basis.
They want to destroy Iran in order to, you know, throw up its hand and surrender.
And no self-respecting nation will do that.
We won't do it in this country.
We won't surrender to any country.
Why should we expect any other nation to do it, particularly when we know that, at least in this particular case, we are on the wrong side of the history, and they are not?
Right.
And in fact, you know, even on this very technical point here, too, where the Ayatollah, I forget if it was the Ayatollah or the president, had said that, well, maybe we will increase enrichment.
Jason Ditz reported at antiwar.com about how that's according to the deal.
It actually says that if any of the other powers leave the deal, that one of the things that Iran can do in response, under the terms of the deal, is start increasing their uranium enrichment again.
Not to weapons grade, but enough that presumably it would give that leaving, you know, exiting party the incentive to rejoin.
And so let me ask you about this, too, because, you know, I think everybody knows Trump doesn't really want a war with Iran.
He likes the politics of being Mr. Tough Guy on the Iran issue, and he needs the Israeli lobby and Saudi money and whatever, I guess, to get along in the world.
But he keeps saying, and I kind of believe him, that what he wants is a better deal, as he calls it.
And yet, he's a complete yutz, and he didn't know the first thing about the article, or the, pardon me, I don't know the first thing about talking.
He didn't know the first thing about the art of the deal, or how to achieve that.
And so he's laid on these crippling sanctions, as Obama would have called them, but he doesn't really have a program for how to fix it from here, how to move forward from here.
Even with Bolton ratcheting up all these tensions, whether Trump exactly told him to do it this way or not, I think he probably did, but it doesn't seem to translate into, as he put it, call me.
They didn't respond to that.
They're saying, we're not going to call him.
He's not treating us in a way that's conducive to any better deal.
When we already had a perfectly good deal in the first place, then we put an even better deal we didn't even need on top of that.
And you want a better deal than that?
There's not one coming.
And so it's obviously a kind of self-generated, rock-and-hard-place situation that Trump's put himself in, because the best deal he could ever get would be to just shut up and go back to the JCPOA, which now he can't do politically.
I totally agree.
And let me point out that the United States breaking its promises and violating its obligation under the international agreements that itself has signed in the past has a long history.
Remember, Bill Clinton reached an agreement with North Korea about shutting down their nuclear reactor and limiting their nuclear program, and giving the North Korean a light water nuclear reactor to generate electricity.
And he started to deliver a little bit of it.
But when George W. Bush came to power, was elected, he basically canceled it.
Then George W. Bush made an agreement with Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, that, look, you give up your nuclear program, and then we normalize our relationship with you, and the commerce will flow, and so on.
Muammar Gaddafi did this, but his country was attacked in 2011 by Obama.
Now, President Obama signed an agreement with Iran, JCPOA, nuclear agreement, which limited severely Iran's nuclear program, and Iran has delivered its part of the deal.
But President Trump has walked away from it.
So this has a long history.
Now, if you look at Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, or if you look at Iranian leaders, they see what's happening.
They see what has happened to their own deals with the United States.
They see what has happened to Iraq, for example, and Saddam Hussein.
They see what has happened with Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
And they ask themselves, we had, as you said, we had a perfectly good deal with the United States, limiting our nuclear program, keeping it completely peaceful and under strict control of International Atomic Energy Agency.
And in return, the relationship will gradually be normalized, starting with economic relationship.
But what happened to it?
Less than a year after they signed the agreement, during the presidential campaign in 2016, whenever Trump talked about Iran, he said that if he's elected, he's going to cancel the nuclear agreement.
Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, after signing the nuclear agreement, said, and let me also point out, as I wrote in an article for Huffington Post at that time, I said, signing this agreement actually is a sort of a defeat for Khamenei in Iran.
And a lot of people know that.
The reason it was a defeat, even though he agreed to it, was because he had set a lot of red lines that the administration of President Rouhani was not supposed to cross in order to reach an agreement.
But Rouhani and his foreign minister, Zarif, crossed those red lines in order to reach the agreement.
And the reason is that they belong to the moderate faction, the reformist faction of Iranian political establishment, that want to reach accommodation with the West.
But even Khamenei, after signing that agreement, he said that people say that we should begin negotiating with the United States to resolve our other differences and other problems.
Let's see how this goes.
Let's see whether the United States delivers on its promises.
If they do, then we can start talking about negotiating other problems that we have.
But that never happened.
It never happened.
And now they are threatening Iran.
They have reimposed suffocating sanctions.
And remember, these sanctions are basically economic war.
In the 1990s, when we imposed these economic sanctions on Iraq, according to United Nations UNICEF organization, at least 576,000 Iraqi infants and young children died because of starvation and malnutrition and lack of food.
That was 576,000, which was far greater than the number of Iraqi soldiers killed in the war with the U.S., both during 1991 and in the invasion of 2003.
So the United States has been waging a war in Iran, and it has created all sorts of problems for ordinary Iranian people who have no role in what has been happening.
And why?
Because Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and people like them have been after Iran for many, many years, to bomb Iran, to bring Iran to its knees.
But as I said, no self-respecting nation, no matter how we feel about them, and no matter how we view them, is not going to do that.
Iraq didn't do it, and we saw what happened.
North Korea has refused to do it, and we will see what will happen.
And Libya agreed to give up its nuclear program, and we saw what happened.
So you like supporting anti-war radio hosts.
That makes sense.
Here's how you can do that.
Go to scotthorton.org slash donate, and there's all kinds of options to do so, and all kinds of different kickbacks at different levels.
Of course, take PayPal, Patreon, and all different kinds of digital currencies and all of those sorts of things.
And anybody who signs up by way of Patreon or PayPal to donate $5 a month to the show will automatically get keys to the Reddit room, my own private Reddit group that I have.
Quite a few members now, and lots of fun in there every day.
So check out all about that at scotthorton.org slash donate, and thanks.
Well, and of course, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan supported Saddam Hussein's invasion and eight-year war against Iran as well.
That might be ancient history to Americans, but I think they probably take that a little bit more seriously over there in Persia to this day.
It's very fresh in Iranian memory that we encouraged, in the first place, we encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran.
And then, although we always claim that we are officially neutral, we tilted towards Iraq, provided all sorts of support, and also encouraged our allies, like France and Britain, to provide Saddam Hussein's army with the most modern weapon while we ourselves imposed an armed embargo on Iran, and even did not deliver on part of the armed deals that the Shah of Iran had signed with the United States before the Iranian Revolution, and had paid for it, but the weapons were never delivered because of the Iranian Revolution.
So these are very fresh in the Iranian people's mind.
They don't forget this.
Which, by the way, too, you have to even, no matter how much you hate John Kerry, and I'm the best at hating John Kerry, but you've got to hand it to the guy that this was part of the deal.
You give up a third of your weapons program, essentially, pour concrete into your Iraq reactor.
I said Boucher and got that wrong on the show, I think, the other day or something, correction, everybody.
It was Iraq where they poured the concrete, the heavy water reactor there, and expanded inspections and signed all these additional protocols and subsidiary agreements and all these things.
And all America had to do was lift sanctions, so stop interfering with their trade, which cost us nothing and is only to gain, as you mentioned, the Boeing airplane deals and all these things.
And then the other thing was, OK, you get your own money back that Jimmy Carter's government stole back in the 1970s, and you'll get, and of course the right wing pretended like, oh, pallets full of cash, pallets full of cash, like this was the biggest scandal, this was American welfare money, but it was their own money.
And John Kerry got, what's his name, Zardari or whatever, to agree to that?
Those were the terms of the deal on our side?
Wow.
That's really something, just this kind of a side deal here.
It goes to show, when Donald Trump railed against the worst deal anybody ever signed, he never read that thing.
He didn't know the first thing about even the premise of the deal.
He didn't care either.
It was just a good political talking point, a good anti-Obama point for himself personally, and a great way to ingratiate himself with the pro-Israel hawks and the Saudis.
Yes, and the money that Kerry returned to Iran, $1.7 billion, is exactly the money that I was talking about.
This is the money that Iran had paid the U.S. for weapons.
The weapons were never delivered, and the money was frozen in an account, so it accumulated interest, and Kerry returned the money to Iran.
Now, Trump has always lied about what Iran got.
Oh, by the way, one more footnote on that.
The World Court, or the International Court of Settlements, or whatever they call it, had already ruled that America, you have to give them that money back.
Exactly, exactly.
And President Trump always lies about what Iran got in return.
He always claims that we gave them $150 billion.
First of all, it wasn't $150 billion.
It was $55 billion.
Secondly, it was Iran's own money that, because of sanctions and because of cutoff connections between Iran's banks and financial institutions, the money that Iran had earned from exporting oil and other exports had been frozen in European and East Asian banks, and it was returned to Iran.
And I'm not even sure that Iran has actually been able to get all of it back.
I remember that John Kerry, a year after signing the agreement in 2016, he said in a speech that, you know, despite all the things that Iran has done, and Iran was supposed to receive its $55 billion that it had, its own money in European banks and East Asian banks, so far they have only received a few billion.
This was as of 2016.
But the president always lies and says, oh, we gave them $150 billion.
No, we didn't do anything like that.
We didn't.
We gave them $1.7 billion, which was Iran's own money that had paid the United States before the Iranian revolution, and we allowed Iran to have access to its own money as a result of its export of oil and other products that had been frozen in European and East Asian banks.
So we didn't give them anything.
We actually didn't do anything.
Iran, in return, Iran signed an agreement with Boeing to buy 100 passenger aircraft, and they were already talk of Iran buying another 100, because Iran actually needs 500 passenger aircraft over the next 10 years, and Boeing was very happy about it, but that was also canceled.
And that would have created thousands of jobs in this country also, which would benefit us in this country, but that was also canceled.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so let's talk about Israel and Saudi and their interest in this, because it seems to have the most to do with America's interests.
I know the State Department, they have their grudge against the old hostage crisis and all that, but that was 40 years ago.
Come on!
No one else in America cares or wants to fight with Iran at all.
Even the oil companies, I know, would rather just do business, many of them anyway, the ones most likely to benefit, I guess, from just a normal state of affairs here, rather than really being behind this push by the U.S. government for regime change and all that kind of thing.
I don't see really any evidence that the oil companies are pushing them behind it.
It's really just the Israelis and the Saudis that want this.
And I'm sure you must have read Trita Parsi's book, Treacherous Alliance, and you probably already knew this anyway, but he tells the story so well of how the Clinton administration, in the very early years of the Clinton administration, they were sort of considering starting to open up to Iran.
At the same time, of course, Martin Indyk was pushing this dual containment policy.
We've got to stay in Saudi to contain Iraq and Iran at the same time and that kind of thing.
But the Clinton administration, I guess, was sort of looking at, well, maybe we could start to change this policy up.
At least, you know, warm things up with the Iranians first, Qatami and all those guys, Rafsanjani, easier to deal with, this sort of idea.
And then the Israelis, all of a sudden, who had been friends with the Iranians and kept relations up and all their weapon sales up and all kinds of spy games and training and undercover negotiations, had kept all that up all through the 1980s and into the early 90s, long after the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Shiite power and theocracy there and all that.
All of a sudden, in like 1993, 94, the Rabin administration decided to change their whole strategic orientation, essentially.
And instead of accentuating their alliances with the periphery, the Ethiopians, the Iranians, the Turks, and like that, that instead they would sort of scapegoat them, especially Iran, in order to sort of cover for making friends with, or at least, you know, dealing on closer terms with the near Arab states on their margin and including a deal for a pseudo-Palestinian state was the best they were ever going to get out of Rabin, anyway.
But what's interesting to me is the part where the Clinton government at the time, sort of, you can even picture Bill Clinton with one raised eyebrow, essentially, and the whole government was like, what?
All of a sudden, Israel has completely changed on a dime and decided that now, instead of being friends with Iran, despite the Iranian revolution and the rise of Shiite power and radical Islam and all these things, as they put it, they never cared before.
But now, all of a sudden, based on nothing really that the Iranians had done, the Israelis decided to scapegoat them.
And it was at that point that Iran, after that, they started increasing their support for Hamas and Hezbollah and trying to screw up, I guess, especially Hamas, and trying to screw up Rabin and the Israelis' plans on that level, kind of more in reaction.
But anyway, I just thought that was funny, the way he portrays that, where it was such a cynical move on Rabin's part, essentially, that the Clinton government thought it was funny.
And they had laughed about it together.
Like, can you believe these guys?
And that kind of thing.
But that's the policy that we're all slave to now.
Is this one that was sort of arbitrary and capricious back then?
Yes.
I mean, Yitzhak Rabin, after Israel signed the agreement, the Oslo agreement, with the Palestine Liberation Organization, lost the Palestine Liberation Organization as the number one enemy.
And according to Twitter policy in the same book that you mentioned, Yitzhak Rabin thought that Israel, in order to remain unified, it needs a number one external enemy.
Just for example, in this country, when we had made the Soviet Union our number one enemy and everything was against the Soviet Union, Rabin decided to make Iran the scapegoat and make Iran the number one enemy, even though despite the rhetoric, the Iranian clerics' rhetoric in the 1980s, they actually kept a secret relation with Israel, whereby they were receiving a lot of weapons from Israel during the Iran-Contra affair.
Even now, even up until a few years ago, I posted a couple of articles about this on one of these websites, in which one of the aides of President Rouhani, the present Iranian president, was jailed before Rouhani was elected.
The reason he was jailed, it is said, was that they wanted to, hardliners wanted to deter Rouhani from running in the presidential election.
So they jailed this close aide.
From jail, he wrote a letter to Khamenei.
In the letter, he reveals something very, very interesting that I translated and reported, but it didn't get the attention that I was hoping that it would get.
In the letter, he says, look, Supreme Leader, if I got in contact, and this is a diplomat, if I got in contact with such and such Israeli minister in such and such conference, it was on your own instruction.
If I talked to such and such Israeli minister in such and such place, it was on your instruction.
In other words, even up until a few years ago, Khamenei, at least behind the scenes, was interested in a sort of dialogue with Israelis, because Iranians recognize that in the strategic sense, like, you know, before the Iranian revolution, Iran and Israel could have, you know, a better alliance than Iran and some of these Arab countries.
Right, because from Iran's point of view, they use the Israelis to balance against the Arabs, so keep them divided on two flanks, which they have much less of an incentive and a need to do now that America's gotten rid of Saddam Hussein for them.
But anyway, go ahead.
Exactly.
And in 1995, Rafsanjani awarded a major oil contract to Conoco, the American oil company, even though the actual winner of that bet for developing an Iranian offshore oil reservoir was Total of France.
But Rafsanjani decided to award the contract to Conoco because he wanted to send, you know, a message that, look, we want a better relationship with the United States.
But what prevented it?
Exactly what you pointed out.
You know, the 180-degree turn of events by Bill Clinton, that he wanted to have a better relation, and all of a sudden Israel didn't want it, and therefore not only he didn't allow Conoco to go into Iran and do the work that it was supposed to do, but also impose total economic sanctions on Iran.
Then Khatami, a couple years later, was elected.
He wanted a dialogue with the United States.
Again, Clinton was sort of interested, but before he could do anything, you know, he left office.
Then we had the war in Afghanistan in 2001.
In 2001, when we invaded Afghanistan, Iran was a major ally of us, even though we don't really acknowledge it.
It was Iran that provided a lot of intelligence to U.S. forces where to go, what to do in Afghanistan, because Iran has been present in Afghanistan for centuries.
Afghanistan used to be part of Iran before up until 1865 or something like that.
And it was Iran's supported group, Northern Alliance, led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated just a few days before September 11 terrorist attack, that actually entered Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, in 2001, in fall of 2001, and overthrew Taliban.
It wasn't U.S. forces.
It was Northern Alliance.
Iran also allowed U.S. aircraft to fly over Iran from the Persian Gulf in order to reach Afghanistan.
Iran also had agreed to the United States to allow U.S. aircraft to land in Iran in case they run into some sort of mechanical problem.
So there were close cooperation and contact between the two because Iran and the United States both had an interest in not seeing Taliban to be in power in Afghanistan.
But what happened a couple months later after all of that, and Iran played a major role in setting up the national unity government in Afghanistan in December of 2001.
This was actually acknowledged by James Dobbins, who was U.S. representative to those negotiations.
Those negotiations took place in Bonn, Germany.
And Iran's representative at that time, which was, who was Iran's present foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, played a major role in convincing Afghan factions to come together and form a national unity government.
And this was something that Dobbins went to the Senate and testified and praised Zarif for it.
This was in December of 2001.
Now, what happened in February of 2002?
Less than two months after that, President George Bush declared access of e-mail and made Iran a charter member of it.
So Iranians are, Iranian leadership, we can think of them any way we want.
But they are not blind, and they have a long memory.
They see that each time they help this country to achieve some of its goals in the Middle East, instead of getting some benefits, instead of getting some easing of tension, they have got a slap in the face, they have got threats, they have got economic sanctions, and so on and so forth.
And this latest episode only shows that, you know, Bolton, Pompeo, and so on, they are not interested in some sort of accommodation with Iran.
Pompeo has listed 12 demands on Iran.
And I bet you, even if Iran agrees to all 12 demands, which will never happen, because those 12 demands basically means political surrender, okay, and no self-respecting political system will do that.
But I promise you that even if Iranian leadership agrees to those 12 demands, they will still make extra demand.
They would still want more.
They would still go after.
They will still pick on Iran, okay?
So these guys are not interested in peace with Iran.
These guys are not interested in better relationship with Iran.
These guys are interested in destroying Iran.
And that's not going to happen.
Iranians are going to defend themselves.
And as Trita Parsi said in his recent piece on NBC website, he said that Iran has been preparing for a U.S. attack since 1990s.
So they are prepared to defend themselves.
So we in this country, especially the part of the population who is not well versed and is not well aware of what's going on and what the Iranians are capable of doing, we should be aware that a war with Iran, if God forbid it happens, it would be not a war between Iran and the United States.
This war will spread toward the Middle East.
It may even spread to Europe because of the fact that a major source of energy of the world is Persian Gulf.
And if the war spreads, all those energy sources will be in danger.
I don't believe Iranians will only limit themselves to defending themselves within their own boundaries.
I believe Iranians will attack Saudi Arabia.
I believe they attack anyone that has a U.S. base on their side.
This is not an aggressive posture, as far as I'm concerned.
This is in defense of their country.
So, and as one of the former CIA officials said the other day, he said that Iranians are masters of asymmetric wars.
So we should be aware of what we get ourselves into.
So this war, the people of this country, you and I and everybody else, should be aware that this is not Iraq war.
This is not Afghanistan war.
This is a war that will destroy the entire Middle East.
It will leave generation after generation with animosity towards the United States.
It will destabilize war's economy, and it will crush the economy in this country, because the oil price will go up to three or four hundred dollars a barrel.
I mean, we should be aware of what we get ourselves into.
But Pompeo and Bolton and people like them, they are just blind to such realities.
They think that they can just bomb Iran out of existence, and they can't.
Hey, you guys, check out my institute, libertarianinstitute.org.
Did you know I have one?
Yeah, I do.
Me and the great Sheldon Richman.
He's my partner there.
It was Will Grigg, the late, great Will Grigg.
But his book is coming out soon, and we've got a lot of great writers there.
I hang out on the blog all day long, and we have a lot of great podcasts as well.
Myself, Mance Rayder, Kyle Anzalone and his great foreign policy podcast, Patrick McFarland and Keith Knight holding it down as well.
Check out all that stuff if you like the libertarian podcasts and writings, libertarianinstitute.org.
Well, I'll tell you what.
I was just talking with Kurt Mills from The National Interest, and he was kind of running through all the various statements where these guys are saying, yeah, it'll look a lot like Operation Desert Fox in December 1998 when Bill Clinton just bombed Iraq for a couple of days and Saddam just bent over and took it and wasn't able to do anything about it on the assumption that, I guess, the Iranians, they just know better than resisting and making us matter.
Yeah, well, I mean, one thing that these people don't realize is that when the Clinton operation occurred in 1998, the region did not have the experience that it has had over the past 20 years.
Those experiences occurred after 1998.
Invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq, attacking Libya, attacking Syria, arming terrorists in Syria that even Hillary Clinton acknowledged in her secret email to John Podesta.
Even John Kerry acknowledged it.
War in Yemen and so on.
So people of that region, particularly the Iranian leadership, have had this 20-year-long experience, have observed what has been happening, have seen what can be done and what cannot be done.
So anybody who compares this with something like what Clinton did in 1998 to Iraq, they're just fooling themselves.
They don't live in reality.
Well, and so, yeah, I mean, you can just tick them off, too, where you have the Bagram Air Base, as well as whatever marine outposts in the Helmand province in Afghanistan are right within missile range.
Same for essentially every bit of American force in Kuwait and, I assume, anywhere in Iraq, where they're still fighting Iraq War III and a half there in Western Iraq against what's left of the ISIS insurgency there, on the side of the Shiites, embedded with those same Iran-backed militias that their leaders have been excoriating here, but ripe for having a knife right in the back there.
And then all up and down the whole Persian Gulf.
Never even mind fighting the U.S. Navy, because I think the U.S. Navy can do a lot of fighting from over the horizon where the Iranians can't reach them.
But the U.S. naval base at Bahrain isn't going anywhere.
And what about the air base in Qatar?
And what about all the different military bases in Saudi Arabia?
Never mind all the oil resources, all up and down the Gulf.
I mean, they could start bombing Abu Dhabi in order to punish the UAE for being a part of the Saudi coalition, the American-backed Saudi coalition.
If that's what they wanted to do, they have missiles enough for that.
So, you're right that they know they would lose eventually.
The U.S. Navy and Air Force can certainly deliver a hell of a lot of high explosives to Persia.
No one questions that.
But to do so without cost to themselves?
Come on.
Exactly.
I mean, that's the main point.
The Iranian leaders know that in any war like that, the U.S. Navy and Air Force will destroy Iran.
Nobody disputes that.
But this will not be a one-sided war.
This did not be something like Iraq war or Afghanistan war.
This will be a war that the other side, our side, the United States side, and its allies in that region, particularly Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, will also suffer, and they will suffer greatly, the forces that will suffer.
In fact, the reason Pentagon and intelligence agencies do not want war with Iran is precisely that, because they know that, yes, Iran will be defeated militarily at some scale, and yes, they can destroy Iran, but Iran will also be able to inflict heavy damage on U.S. and its allies.
I just saw a cartoon the other day that the cartoon said, well, Iran wants a war with us.
Look, Iran has put itself right in the middle of all of our military bases in the Middle East.
And there was a map that showed Iran's map surrounded by tens of U.S. military bases.
So the point is, yes, we can destroy Iran, we can destroy it several times over, but this will not be a one-sided war.
This will be a two-sided war.
And as simulation after simulation after simulation by Pentagon over the years has shown, a war with Iran will quickly turn into an attrition war that will last 15 to 20 years.
So do we want to get ourselves into that?
Do we want to destroy our economy, whatever we have in this country, and destroy the rest of the world in order to do that?
I don't think we do.
This is not a war of necessity, because Iran is not threatening the United States.
We are the ones who are threatening Iran.
This is even the New York Times reported today that intelligence officials say that a lot of things that Iran has done has been in response to aggressive actions that the U.S. and in particular Bolton and Pompeo have taken.
Europeans also know that.
China and Russia also know that.
Well, we should mention, too, that important British general said the other day, there's no new information about any new threats here.
These are our allies in Iraq still.
Yes, exactly.
Chris Peega, the British commander, and he's the deputy commander of the coalition forces, Western coalition forces, that are fighting the remnant of ISIS in Syria.
He said, we don't have any new information.
We are aware of them.
We know what they are.
And in fact, this is what he said.
He said, most of them are very compliant, and they are going about their own business.
We don't have any new information.
But yet, Pompeo and Bolton are pushing the president that, in my view, doesn't want a war, doesn't want a war with Iran or doesn't want a new war.
They're pushing him in that direction, only because of their obsession with Iran over the years and the fact that they just want to attack Iran.
Now, Pompeo probably wants it because he has this Christian fundamentalist view of himself and Israel and so on.
And Bolton has been obsessed with Iran and its non-existence nuclear weapon program for at least 20 years.
So not only this is hurting ordinary Iranians that are, generally speaking, poor U.S., as I said, but it has also made the hardliners in Tehran stronger.
They are now arguing in Tehran that, look, we told you we cannot trust the United States.
We told you that it's useless to limit our nuclear program and to go along with what they want, because they can never be trusted.
Khamenei's motto has always been, over the past 30 years, that the United States cannot be trusted.
And in fact, we proved him wrong.
Right.
You know?
Yeah.
And then also on the ground, right, just economically speaking, you know, by equation, that means the business interests that are closest to the state now benefit at the expense of the business interests who, you know, make more money off of international trade and getting along with other countries, which diminishes their power compared to that of the right-wing hardliners.
Exactly.
And that's what happened during President Obama's years when he imposed those tough sanctions.
What happened?
Ordinary Iranians were really here.
The economy was in terrible shape, but the black market that was created for going around these sanctions was thriving.
And who controlled the black market?
All the, you know, entities that were closely linked to hardliners.
They became fabulous to reach at the expense of ordinary Iranians with the excuse that they are trying to get around the sanctions.
And over the past three or four years, we have had, you know, many of those people put on trial by the Rouhani administration after they reported their, you know, their corruption and their stealing and so on to the judiciary.
So the same thing here now.
All the economic entities that are linked with the hardliners are going to benefit.
And all the ordinary people, Iranian people, who are poor U.S. and like the United States, are going to be hurt.
And they have been hurt.
I have my own close relatives in Iran that are pharmacists.
Two of my brother-in-law's are pharmacists.
And they tell me that there is a huge lack of or shortage of critical medicines for such, you know, illnesses as cancer and other, you know, other, you know, bad diseases like cancer and so on.
It really is just like the bad old days of the Obama years.
They're the worst of those crippling sanctions, as they call them.
And so now, explain this specific point a little bit better.
I'm so glad you had that firsthand source about that as well.
But, you know, everybody knows, I guess, if you read the New York Times, that America has not put sanctions on medicine.
So, but you're saying something about those sanctions is keeping medicine out of Iran anyway, or is preventing Iranian industry from making up for the deficiency and so forth.
So how's that, sir?
Because in order to pay for the medicine that you need to, let's say, import from Europe, how are you going to do it?
You open a line of credit with a European bank.
And then once the medicine has been delivered, or you put on some deposit for what you want to import, and once the medicine has been imported into Iran, you pay the rest.
But when you cut off Iranian financial institution and banks from, you know, from accessing to international financial system, it's called SWIFT, then how are they going to pay for it?
That's one reason.
The other reason is that even if, even if medicines are not sanctioned, and even if some exceptions are allowed in order for Iranians to pay for the medicines that they want to import, major European corporations, pharmaceutical corporations, and also the United States try to avoid Iran.
Why?
Because they are afraid that if they, you know, they export their medicine to Iran, at some point either Trump administration or another, you know, future US administration will come after them and find an excuse to punish them.
And they don't want to put themselves into that.
In fact, I talked, I personally talked to a representative of a pharmaceutical company in this country, and I wanted to see whether it, you know, it can be arranged for some of these critical medicines to be shipped in Iran, because my brother-in-law told me that there is a great shortage of it.
They said that, exactly what I told you, Scott, they said that even though we are allowed to do it, we don't want to do it because you're afraid that in the future we will be punished.
So these are the two reasons.
Or they say that food, food and stuff, is not sanctioned.
But again, who is going to export food and stuff to Iran under these conditions, and how are Iranians are going to pay for it when they are cut off from international financial institution and financial system through which they can pay?
These are the reasons.
So these are just lies that, you know, we haven't sanctioned that.
Yes, you have.
In practical terms, you have sanctions, food, medicine, and so on.
They were saying the same thing about Iraq.
And we know, as I said, and UNICEF, the United Nations organization reported, and even the New York Times reported it, and whenever I mention this, I actually link to that article of New York Times, that 576,000, and this was the minimum.
There are much higher statistics also.
But at least 576,000 Iraqi infant and young people, very young people, children, died because of lack of food and starvation and malnutrition and so on.
The same thing will be happening in Iran.
And we will be responsible for it.
And we will be responsible for this fact, and we will be responsible for destroying the goodwill of Iranian people toward the United States, who are, as I said over the past many, many decades, have always been pro-U.S., rather than, you know, an enemy of the United States.
They are very aware of what the United States has done in Iran.
The 1953 coup, the support of Iraq and dealing with the Iran-Iraq war, the shooting down of Iranian passenger aircraft, the sanctions, the threats, and so on and so forth.
But the Iranian people have always said, well, these are U.S. government.
American people are good people, which is true, of course.
But American people do not have any role right now in what Bolton and Pompeo are trying to do in Iran.
But the Iranians don't see it this way.
The way they see it is that we made concessions, we limited our nuclear program, we elected a moderate president who crossed the red line set by Khamenei for nuclear negotiations.
We made every effort to deliver on obligation, and look what you got.
And this is what practically any journalist that has gone to Iran has reported, that the mood of Iranian people about the United States has completely changed.
In fact, just two days ago there was a long letter in the letter sections of New York Times from a guy who had gone to Tehran and came back, and he said the Iranian people think that the United States has been waging a war on Iran, and if they want to extend this economic war to military war, they say bring it on.
We are ready for it.
So that's what has happened.
And we should inform people about what's happening, because this will be a disaster, not only for them, but it will also be for us in this country.
Yeah.
Well, and they're really trying to define Koss's belly down too, or at least some of them were.
I don't know if anybody has any real evidence who did it, but they glommed on immediately to the not very destructive bombing of these two oil tankers, as well as pointing to mythological, mostly mythological Iranian support for the Houthis translates then into full control of the Houthis, and therefore full Iranian responsibility for any lucky hit that the Houthis get off, including drone attacks against Riyadh, against oil pipelines, and these kinds of things.
And they're trying to...
Scott, never underestimate what MEK might do.
There have been reports, although not independently confirmed, there have been reports by former members of MEK that they have seen members of MEK in Persian Gulf Arab countries trying to buy speedboats.
So they can do this type of action.
They can buy speedboats, they can pretend that they are members of Iranian IRGC, and attack some of these installations, and then blame it on Iran.
When Zarif visited New York a while ago, a couple of weeks ago, he warned against that.
He said, we don't think the president, President Trump, wants war with Iran.
But there is a B team here, which he meant by John Bolton, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben Salman, and Ben Zayed, the ruler of United Arab Emirates, that they want war with Iran.
So they can stage an accident or an attack, and then blame it on Iran.
As I said, there have been unconfirmed reports, but this is what is circulating in the internet, that former MEK members have reported that MEK members, some of their operatives, have been trying to buy speedboats in Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, in Kuwait, and in Qatar, and in the United Arab Emirates.
Hey, and don't forget that Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda have a huge incentive to provide an incentive here for America to act against Iran, just as they did in their fake chemical attacks in Syria.
Lo and behold, AQ's on our side in this one in Syria, as Hillary's lickspittle, what's his name, was it Jamie Rubin, wrote to her in an email back when she was Secretary of State.
Yes, exactly.
I think Sidney Blumenthal wrote to her about Libya, and John Podesta, and maybe Jamie Rubin also wrote to her about...
It was Sullivan, Jake Sullivan was the one who said AQ is on our side in Syria, right there.
Sorry about that.
That's in the WikiLeaks, everybody.
Thank you, Chelsea Manning, sitting in prison right now.
I know.
Yeah, so we should be aware of what's going on and what they are getting themselves into.
As I said, we have had enough wars of destruction in the Middle East.
As much as I dislike a lot of Trump's policy, I agree with him regarding the wars in the Middle East.
He has said many, many times that we have spent $7 trillion on wars in the Middle East, and we've got nothing for them in return.
Before he was elected, he mentioned at least a couple of times that I remember that yes, we have problems with Iran, but the way I see it, it is Iran and Russia that are fighting with ISIS.
And that made me hopeful that if Trump is elected president, maybe the wars in the Middle East will end, or at least wind down, and we see a more peaceful region so that those countries can start rebuilding themselves.
But people like Pompeo and Bolton, and I hate to say even Obama and Kerry, because it was Obama and Kerry who agreed to support Saudi Arabia's aggression against Yemen.
According to the New York Times, Kerry urged our support for Saudi Arabia in return for Saudi Arabia not opposing the nuclear agreement between Iran and 5 plus 1.
So it was Obama and Kerry who began supporting, providing support to Saudi Arabia in its war of aggression in Yemen.
And that has, of course, been continued by the Trump administration.
So people like me were hoping that, okay, maybe President Trump will just end these wars, or at least limit them, put some forces out, and let those poor countries begin rebuilding themselves.
That hasn't happened.
And if you are not careful, Pompeo and Bolton will put, you know, will add another major war.
And this war will be, compared to this war, if it happens, all other wars that we have had in that region will be child's play.
Compared to that, they're putting on a path to that type of war.
And we should be very careful.
We should be very aware of what these people are doing.
Right.
And you know what?
You shouldn't have to be a non-interventionist or a liberal or a libertarian or any kind of anti-interventionist conservative by ideology in any way.
But just any kind of normal person who's not Mike Pompeo or John Bolton or Donald Trump, for that matter, ought to be able to see that, hey, the war in Yemen is a great opportunity to make a new good deal with Iran.
Here's something that we can do together is negotiate an end to this terrible war that Obama started that, geez, maybe we shouldn't have continued for the last two years.
But what do you say, Ayatollah?
Forget the nuclear deal for now.
Let's make peace together.
You put pressure on the Houthis.
We'll put pressure on the UAE and the Saudis.
And we'll work this thing out and stop the fighting right now.
Go for that.
But no, instead, it's this group of guys.
And so that's unthinkable.
Yes, exactly.
And they blame everything on Iran, whereas it was Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates with the support of the United States that started the war in Yemen.
And even New York Times and places like Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs have published articles in which they have said, look, the Houthis in Yemen are not Lebanese Hezbollah that is totally supported by Iran.
These are independent people.
The New York Times has very good reports at that time saying that Iran didn't have any involvement with the Houthis before the war in Yemen started.
But after the war started, Iran saw an opportunity to give Saudi Arabia, its main rival, a bloody nose.
And Iran, according to, for example, people like Hugh Silverman, who is the, you know, in charge of International Crisis Group projects for the Middle East, in a very good article that he published in Foreign Policy, he said that, you know, all these things about Houthis and Iran are greatly exaggerated.
Not that Iran hasn't given them any help.
I'm sure they have.
But it has been very, very limited.
For the simple fact, Yemen has been completely surrounded by U.S., Saudi, Emirates, and Egyptian forces on all sides.
So even if Iran wanted to give them, you know, major, you know, send them major shipments of weapons, they couldn't because of the fact that I just mentioned.
And this is not what I say.
This is, for example, what Hugh Silverman said in his Foreign Policy article, or what New York Times has reported.
So there is great exaggeration, and there is this tendency to, you know, blame everything on Iran.
It is not that Iran hasn't done things that are, you know, questionable.
Of course they have.
We all know they have.
They have done a lot of things.
But blaming it all on Iran and ignoring all other facts is not just, you know, it's not just ignoring the reality on the ground.
And as you said, you don't have to be a Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative or anything to see, you know, the reality of the situation.
But with Pompeo and Bolton, no.
They're totally blind.
They're pursuing the one-dimensional pursuit of war with Iran.
Everything is Iran's fault, and therefore let's find an excuse to attack Iran and destroy Iran.
Hang on just one second for me.
Hey guys, don't you think it'd be cool if you could go to college, but Tom Woods was the dean of the thing?
Yeah, well, something like that.
Check out libertyclassroom.com, where Tom Woods went and had his pick of all the best professors to teach their courses in the real history and economics that you didn't learn when you went to college the first time around, or maybe you didn't learn because you skipped your higher education altogether.
But here's some real American history and some real economics, the kind of stuff that you've been missing.
It's libertyclassroom.com, and make sure to click through the link in the right-hand margin of my website, scotthorton.org.
And I don't know if anybody else cares, but to me, it's a very important point that the really no fool and very worst thing that Iran has done in this century was absolutely exploit, to the full extent they possibly could, America's war against Iraq, against Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath party.
And when George Bush offered to put the Supreme Islamic Council and the Ba'ath Brigade and the Dawa party in power in Baghdad, the Ayatollah, well, and his friend Sistani, Khamenei and his friend Sistani, they took Bush up on it to the greatest extent and waged a horrible war against the Sunni Arabs, cleansing them out of the capital city there, changing the balance of power in Iraq in ways that are going to reverberate forever.
And so that is all their fault.
And they got blood on their hands, like crazy.
Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people even killed by Iranian-backed militias.
But they were, it was called the El Salvador option.
It was Donald Rumsfeld who implemented it.
It was the USA that did it for them.
And so it's the USA that bears 99.9% of the responsibility, even for that, which is truly the very worst thing that you could point at Iran for doing in a century, was taking full advantage of the advantage that George Bush gave them.
And remember, at that time, I'm sure people like you remember, at that time, people were saying, everybody goes to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran.
Which means they were talking about invading Iran, because they thought that, okay, we invaded Iraq, and in just, you know, six weeks, we overthrew Saddam Hussein.
How much stronger is Iran than Saddam Hussein?
So they were talking about, you know, invading Iran.
And again, yeah, they fought a five-year civil war on Iran's side while refusing to talk to Iran the whole time.
Exactly.
They did it all for him anyway.
Exactly.
It's the craziest thing, it really is.
I can tell I confuse people when I talk about this, because it doesn't sound right.
But it doesn't sound right, because yeah, it was a really bad policy.
Exactly.
And Iran had supported these Shiite groups for 20 years.
Iran had armed them, trained them, gave, you know, had given them, you know, a place in Iran, and so on, had financed them.
And Iran had very close connections with all the major Shiite figures within Iraq.
So when we invaded Iraq, and given that Iraq is majority Shiite, 65 percent of the population is Shiite, of course the Shiite will come to power.
And of course these Shiite groups are allied in Iran, because it was Iran that, you know, supported them and funded them against Saddam Hussein regime, which was Iran's arch rival.
So, you know, like you said, they took full advantage of what we had done in Iraq.
Right.
And you know what, I got to say this too, and I think I can say it fast enough, everybody should know this by now, again, as crazy as this sounds, it's quite clear, Obama explained himself to Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic in 2012, that the reason America was supporting the jihadist war against Assad was because Assad was friends with Iran.
And after, and we can attack Iran, and we can't undo the results of Iraq War II by starting that war all over again for the Sunnis this time, that's sort of out of the question.
But so as a consolation prize, we can try to take the Assad regime, which was also Baathist, but backed by the Shiites and the Alawites, and with a friendly, I guess, alliance, a real alliance with Iran there.
And so, we'll take Assad away from them.
And then that whole policy, in the short history here, blew up completely in their face, in the rise of the actual Islamic state, not just in eastern Syria, but then blew back all the way in and conquered western Iraq.
At which point, Obama launched in August of 2014, Iraq War III, to try to undo that mistake, again, aligning with these very same Iranian-backed, also Iranian-backed, Shiite militias, such as the Ba'ata Brigade, and al-Hajj, and for that matter, the Iraqi army, which is nothing but a Shiite militia itself.
And they're the ones, so they fought Iraq War III for them, too.
And then now they still want to complain, and point their finger at Iran.
Yes, yes.
And the president votes that we are going to keep forces in Iraq to watch Iran.
And then, once he says that, and Iranians take, you know, defensive measures to protect themselves against any attack, then Bolton and Pompeo jump in, and they say, oh, we have received new indications of threats by Iran for attacking our forces, and therefore, okay, let's send our aircraft carriers and so on to the Persian Gulf.
I mean, this vicious cycle never, never ends.
It really is crazy.
I mean, especially when Trump is saying, yeah, that's why we need these troops.
That's what they're saying about Syria, too.
We got to leave some there to check Iranian power.
That was Bolton's announcement, to check Iranian power in Syria.
Then Trump said the same thing, as you just mentioned there, about Iraq, when literally, actually, the American special operations forces, and whoever all are there, are fighting with, still to this day, in Iraq War III and a half, sorry for the redundancy, but still to this day, are fighting, I don't know if they're literally embedded with these Shiite militias, but essentially, they're fighting side by side with these same Shiite militias and the Iraqi Shiite army against what's left of the ISIS insurgency there, which, of course, can never be completely eliminated.
And so this is, at this point, a very low-scale war compared to the full-scale attack against the Islamic State.
But now that it's just al-Qaeda in Iraq again, essentially, we're not there looking at Iran.
We're not there to check Iran.
We're quite literally fighting with Iran's side today, and yesterday, and tomorrow, against the Sunni insurgency, just as before.
Yes, exactly.
Precisely.
But anyway, whatever.
I guess CNN doesn't understand this, so they can't correct on anything important.
They get attacked.
Trump must be working for the Russians, because I don't understand his Iraq policy.
I don't know what it is.
But it seems important.
And you know what?
I'll go ahead and make this complaint all over your interview, too, is that the reason it's like this, that they can never talk about who's on whose side in Iraq right now, is because they never did in Iraq War II, either.
For really, that whole five or eight years, however you count it, of that war, they essentially said, it's the Americans and the Iraqi people versus the terrorists.
And never admitted that.
It's the Americans and the Shiites versus the Sunnis.
And then, oh, actually, we're stabbing the Shiites in the back and we're turning back toward the Sunnis now.
They never talked about any of that.
They never explained any of that.
And so, at this point, far into the future, after Iraq War III is over and the final parts of that, they still can't ever say who's who and who's on whose side, because they never learned it in the first place.
You had to be reading Bob Dreyfuss and whoever, Patrick Cockburn, to try to figure out what was going on, mostly foreign media and alternative media, because the Post and the Times, they might report the facts sometimes, them and TV, but they would never explain the real narrative about what was actually happening in the war in any kind of larger sense.
And so that's why everybody's still completely, that's why people like Bolton are able to manipulate the narrative and make these Shiite militias in Iraq sound like they're our enemies when they're not.
Actually, there is a new, very good article, a very good report by Robert Fisk of The Independent, that basically explains what you just said, Scott, you know, the alliance between Shiite militia and U.S. forces and so on and so on.
It's a very good article that I suggest to everybody to read it, either on The Independent's site or at Counter Punch.
Counter Punch has also posted that article.
It's a great article.
And Patrick Cockburn, as you mentioned, has reported on this so many times.
And it's really unfortunate that places like New York Times and so on do not explain these things to American people in this country.
Because if people in this country become better aware of the facts on the ground, a lot of things in this country can change for better regarding the foreign policy of the United States, particularly the Middle East.
But unfortunately, that's not happening yet.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess, you know, a big part of it is that it's all so far away.
And all these names and dates, Bader and Soder and all these things, it requires a whole kind of education to understand really what's so bad about it all.
So if you're not up to learning about nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons treaties, and if you're not up to learning about who's a Sunni, who's a Shia, who's an Arab and who's a Persian, who's on whose side and which oil patch are they fighting over and which neoliberal or neoconservative doctrine do they favor in D.C. or whatever it is, then you just kind of got to leave it to somebody else, I guess.
You know, this is kind of the way it's always been, right, is that people fight like dogs and, you know, over and over about domestic policy.
But when it comes to foreign policy, they just kind of leave that to the experts, except the experts keep doing such a poor job.
They really need someone to check them, but they just keeps not happening.
And experts like yourself don't get the chance to do it right.
So.
Yeah, exactly.
Because all the best of us are people who don't want power in the first place.
If we did, we wouldn't be the best of us anymore, would we?
So.
That's true.
Yeah.
Anyway, I sure love talking to you.
Thanks for coming back on the show, Mohamed.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
I really enjoyed it.
Good deal.
All right, you guys, that's Mohamed Sahimi.
And oh, by the way, make sure, yeah, I'll be keeping my eye out for your new one for antiwar.com here.
Appreciate that.
It's coming very soon.
Good deal.
And then, all right, you guys, so that's Mohamed Sahimi.
He said he also has another one coming out for Jim Loeb's blog, which we're going to end up reprinting that too, I guess, because I think we have a deal like that with Jim or it certainly will link to it anyway at antiwar.com.
So everybody keep your eye open for that.
The great Mohamed Sahimi, again, professor of chemical engineering at USC.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
